Re: Refactoring Forum?

Re: Refactoring Forum?

Well, forum administrators will have lots of work with moving stuff between the various forums.

The biggest problem of the forum structure IMHO is having >75% of all posts in one forum. I'd therefor suggest to merge some underused forums and find a solution for splitting the 'Rails Programming' forum (e.g. ActiveRecord, ActionView,...). Having too many forums can be a problem...

The other problem I'm seeing with the optimization forum (even though I've learned more by looking at how people refactor stuff than anything else) is that optimizing a SQL table has nothing to do with configuring environment.rb or profiling a ruby code snippet.

A first suggestion is the following setup (which definetly can be optimized):

Re: Refactoring Forum?

"Deployment" is not really related to "Starting out", it's probably more related to DB optimization, apache/mongrel optimization and rails code refactoring. Probably that's what should be put together into a group.

I'm against merging completely unrelated topics in an "optimization forum", as we might have people who know how to optimize SQL statements and index tables, and others who know how to optimize a ruby method. And other people might know how to reduce the session overhead and suggest a plugin that reduces ActiveRecord overhead. Noone will know everything, and merging such things results in a big mess - about the same mess as we currently have in our "Rails Programming" forum.

Having too general topic names leads to people posting in the 'big forum', simply because they don't really think twice where to put something. Which is why usually "general discussion" forums aren't perfect.

Also, please take a look at the "Rails Programming" forum. Many threads cover simple questions, which beginners might classify as 'optimization' (and should be posted in either rails core forums or 'app theory' ). Refactoring is usally something else, as it's about cleaning up code in specific methods (or models), plus reducing CPU usage.

Besides that, I strongly vote for a 'Ajax / Prototype / Scriptaculos / LowPro / Rails Helpers' forum - currently we have separate forums for JavaScript, XHTML etc, and where do people post all their Ajax stuff? In the Rails Programming forum - where it probably doesn't belong, especially as Ajax helpers are moved out of the Rails core with 2.0.

Finally, I wonder if it would be a good idea to have a forum for rails newbies. I remember when I started with Rails a few months ago, I wasn't even able to tell what is Rails and what is Ruby, and what ActiveRecord is. I probably would have preferred posting in a "New to Rails?" forum.

PS: I'd also like to vote against a "Tutorials" forum. Look what's inside: cPanel, acts_as_tree, updating several models from one form, Amazon S3, Refactoring, Installing Rails on Ubuntu,... - probably many of these threads are interesting, but you'd never look for them in that forum. I think its better to move the tutorials to the relevant forums and have *one* sticky in each forum with a list of topics that are tutorial-esque.

Re: Refactoring Forum?

We did have a beginners forum here but that didnt work out so well.

I edited my list up top taking into consideration the good points you made.

Personally I think the whole web development forum is kind of a waste.. those forums should be integrated into other subjects..and I think we can all agree that design & flash are better dealt with on forums that specialize in just that.

Of course the mods will have the last word, but food for thought never hurts.

Re: Refactoring Forum?

Just letting you guys know that yes, we are taking all this into consideration. I'm not sure if what we end up doing will be exactly like what is proposed, but I really like what I see here personally. Look for some changes in the coming week or two once I have time to fully implement some new forums.